The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible expresses the skepticism of a life that has seen most things, and finds it hard to make sense of it all. The more we know about life, the more cynical we can become. We may have more, rather than less, unanswered questions as we age. We may find that religious faith, and personal trust in others, is harder rather than easier to come by. A friend who had experienced a great deal of betrayal and disappointment by people whom he expected more of, shared with me that his wife had taken it “all rather badly as it stings and hurts, and she doesn’t trust anyone just now.” There are plenty of reasons to doubt that there is a good and loving God if we look for them. Some of us may want to have a stronger faith but the advice people may give us may become reasons to doubt.

Lynn Anderson in If I Really Believe, Why Do I Have These Doubts? lists several reasons to doubt, several blind alleys seekers are encouraged to explore that lead them nowhere but to frustration.

First, is the advice that faith requires you to turn off your mind, and to just try harder to believe. “Don’t think about it – just believe!” Wanting to believe, or wishful thinking. does not make it so. Trying to ignore troublesome doubts, and attempting to sweep them under the rug, will not work. We fool ourselves if we try to believe by being intellectually dishonest. Closing our eyes to problems will not make them go away. God made our minds so that we can interpret what is happening in life. We are created to think through our understanding of life. That is why we have a book like Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It is the journal of an intelligent seeker who is struggling with trying to make sense of the issues of life. His words ‘are like goads, his collected sayings like firmly embedded nails – given by one Shepherd’(12:11). They are meant to goad us to action in our search for answers. When difficulties arise in life, we cannot dismiss them as though they do not matter. We must think through their implications and find a resolution of them in our beliefs. To be a Christian is not to commit intellectual suicide as some people contend, even if some Christians behave that way.

John Stott wrote a little book entitled, Your Mind Matters, in which he criticized “the misery and menace of mindless Christianity.” He argues why it is important that we use our minds. “Faith is not credulity. H.L. Mencken…once said that ‘faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.’ But Mencken was wrong. Faith is not credulity. To be credulous is to be gullible, to be entirely uncritical, undiscerning and even unreasonable in one’s beliefs. But it is a great mistake to suppose that faith and reason are incompatible.” He quotes Proverbs 2:3-6

“if you call out for insight

and cry aloud for understanding,

and if you look for it as silver

and search for it as for hidden treasure,

then you will understand the fear of the Lord

and find the knowledge of God.

For the Lord gives wisdom,

and from his mouth come

knowledge and understanding.”

The second reason to doubt is to assume that faith is like something you can catch. To this way of thinking all you have to do is to wait for faith to happen. It will be like waiting for lightning to strike, like it did Saul on the Damascus road.

Parents who take this approach do not influence their children in any direction. They say that their children will make up their own minds when they grow up. Others say that the doubts their children experience will go away when they mature. I heard my aunt and uncle say that about their children. It was an excuse for them not going to church. As a result they deprived their children of the advantages of a childhood Christian education. They have had a hard time in adult life catching up.

More education or maturation does not necessarily bring faith. Faith is our response to revelation, and requires a choice on our part. Many people have reason to doubt because they believe that they have to do nothing and God has to do everything. God calls us to choose. “Choose you this day, whom you will serve.” Soren Kierkegaard calls the refusal to choose, to make a decision of faith, cowardice.

“Cowardice wants to prevent the step of making a decision. To accomplish this it takes to itself a host of glorious names. In the name of caution cowardice abhors any over-hastiness. It is against doing anything before the time is ripe…. In the end, failure to decide prevents one from doing what is good.”

The third reason to doubt is the attitude that faith requires definitive proof. To this way of thinking, conclusive proof in the form of rational arguments is essential to faith. Since such proof is lacking, faith is, what Mark Twain defined as, “believing what any fool knows ain’t so.” But no person can be forced to believe by logic. Faith does not come to a person by being argued into it. If this were so, the smarter people would be the first to believe, and the duller people the last. But the opposite may be true. Paul, who, despite doing a lot of arguing himself, quoted Isaiah 29:14

“‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.’ Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world.”

Intelligence levels have little to do with faith. You cannot reach a conclusion about faith in Christ based upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Faith requires a risk, a leap, or it would not be faith. It is a decision without complete proof and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Faith is a leap based not on proof but trust in the evidence that is available.

There is no life without this kind of trust. We decide what is worthy of our trust without requiring absolute proof. We trust ourselves to all sorts of people, machinery and organizations because we have enough evidence that they are worthy of our trust. We do not completely understand many things we trust every day, e.g. banks, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, computers. But because we have evidence that they work, we use them, act on them, put our trust in them. We are called to examine, not proofs for the existence of God, but evidence of a loving relationship with the personal God. Frederick Buechner writes,

“We all want to be certain, we all want proof, but the kind of proof that we tend to want – scientifically or philosophically demonstrable proof that would silence all doubts once and for all – would not, in the long run, I think, answer the fearful depths of our need at all. For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind to keep the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-to-day lives who might not be writing messages about himself in the stars but who in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle we are really after.” (The Magnificent Defeat)

The fourth reason to doubt is the belief that faith comes through miracles. If only we could see a miracle happening! Would we believe? Witnessing miracles does not automatically generate faith. Take the Pharisees for example. “Even after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs in their presence they still would not believe in him…..For this reason they could not believe.” Lynn Anderson comments on St. John’s conclusion:

“What an ominous statement. Notice that the unbelief of the people John was describing was a choice. Faith in Jesus would have threatened their vested interests. Consciously or unconsciously, they had chosen to set their hearts against Christ and had continued choosing not to believe in spite of miraculous proof over a long period of time. Finally, their hearts so hardened that even the miraculous signs of Jesus himself would not touch them! It is possible to reject faith so often that we can wind up actually dismantling our believing machinery.

The mightiest signs and wonders cannot change our hearts! Only the Spirit of God can do that! Through the gospel, the Spirit of God can move us to choose faith. But even then, he will not force us – only touch us, convict us, call us on. How we respond is entirely up to us.”

If you ask people who do not believe in Christ, what it would take for them to believe they usually mention one of these reasons to doubt. They want a miracle, or conclusive proof, or they want to wait for divine intervention, or they or their peer group think that faith is anti-intellectual. These reasons, I believe, are ill-founded.

There are plenty of reasons to doubt. We can always find a reason to avoid believing in God and serving him. The choice is ours. But God sent his Son so that we might believe. We have to decide whether we are going to worship him or not. Examine the evidence, by all means. Faith can be commitment based on the evidence. Our mind is engaged. But at the end of the day you still have to take a leap of faith if you want to experience God’s presence. Invite the Spirit of God into your life so that you will know the reality of Christ.

Doubt is a double-edged sword. It can act as either a deterrent or a stimulant. Doubt about whether it was possible to sail west across the Atlantic Ocean could have kept Christopher Columbus from discovering America. Instead, he doubted that the world was flat and that he would fall off the edge if he traveled too far. He used his doubt to spur him on to new endeavor. Doubt, may in fact, help us to recover our faith. Doubt which persists may prove to be of some value. This was the case of a man who gave us a case study of how belief and doubt could co-exist and produced a prayer that has echoed in the hearts of countless others since.

There is nothing worse than having to experience the suffering of your child. A father brought his son to the disciples in the hope that the boy would be healed, but they could not help him. This man is like so many parents today who helplessly watch their child suffering from some malignant disease, caught in the grip of some addiction, or going off the rails by living at the mercy of their peer group. Such parents don’t know where to turn for help. Sometimes all that they can do is to bring them to Jesus in their prayers. The disciples brought this boy to Jesus who, when asked by the father, “if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.” Jesus replied by raising his eyebrows and challenging the father, “If I can? Everything is possible for him who believes.” What an extraordinary claim! It challenges us today: the extreme possibility of faith. Yet we know that the possibility of healing is not easy. We cannot say to others, “Just have faith.” This is why the boy’s father cries out in his desperation, “I do believe, help me overcome my unbelief!”

He has a faith that struggles with doubt. He is honest about the struggle he experiences. He pleads for help just as he is, a doubter. The father does not come to Jesus with a demand but with humility. He does not try to fake a faith he doesn’t possess. He pleads with Jesus to do what he can. Yet Jesus honors the man who would bring his son out of compassion to seek help. The prayer of the father is the prayer I can own for myself: “I believe, help my unbelief.”

Many of us struggle with doubt even though we have faith and want to believe. For many people pure faith is difficult because of the damage done them in childhood or in the trauma of life. Doubt may have its roots in our basic temperament, or our particular stage in life. Doubt and faith co-exist for many. Yet that may be more normal than you imagine. In fact, there may be a value in experiencing doubt – or unbelief.

Gary E. Parker has written about this in his book, The Gift of Doubt: From crisis to authentic faith. He claims that doubt can do us good, that doubt is not always evil, and that doubt can help us to have a stronger faith. “If we maintain an openness to new truth, …we might find that uncertainty can actually enliven and strengthen our faith. Dr. Clark Pinnock proposes, ‘There is also a good side to this sort of uncertainty… Doubt can spur deeper reflection and further discovery…. Doubting may lead to greater certainty.’”

Gary Parker suggests four ways doubt can be turned to good. First of all, doubt can test the truth of faith. Thomas Gutherie wrote, “Are not many damned just because they never doubt? They go on, satisfied with themselves; not doubting but that they are on the right course, when every step they take leads them further and further astray.”

An unexamined faith may be a false faith. Much of Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees centered on their dogmatic arrogance. They had their minds made up and were not open to other interpretations of the truth. Fanatical adherence to religious conviction is not necessarily a virtue. When the mind is closed to other truth, there is bred in the believer an intolerance and a cruelty that is incompatible with a God of love. Many Muslims and Communists suffer from the kind of fanaticism.

When you go on a long journey in your own vehicle, you don’t assume that the automobile is in good order. You have it checked and serviced for you don’t want it to break down on the journey and inconvenience you. Doubt serves as a testing ingredient of faith. It subjects our beliefs to trials to see if those beliefs have the power necessary to complete an arduous journey. A faith that is worthwhile is a faith that is checked for weakness. Doubt provides that check. To be never in doubt is to invite disaster.

Second, doubt destroys faith that doesn’t deserve our continued allegiance. A naïve trust in something or someone who doesn’t deserve it is destructive. People learn that too much faith in corrupt political leaders, or unfaithful spouses, or fair-weather friends leads to disappointment. Thinking the best of someone, who continually lets you down and doesn’t follow through on promises, is unhealthy. To continue to believe in something that has proved itself unworthy of our faith shows our credulity rather than our common sense.

By 1530, Copernicus had questioned the accepted belief of astronomy that the earth was the center of the known universe. He put forward the theory that the sun was actually at the center and that the earth and the other planets revolved around it. The church rejected his theory, but future discoveries proved him correct. We know what happened to Galileo. Their doubts about current beliefs destroyed faith in a system that did not deserve continued support, and established a new truth valuable to human life.

Any doubt that destroys faith in any false god is good, and serves God’s purpose. When doubt upends a false faith, it serves as an asset to a true one. The faith that cannot survive the trials and tests of life probably didn’t deserve to live anyway.

Third, doubt enhances a faith that proves itself worthy of commitment. Doubt takes faith and exercises it so that it cannot help but grow stronger. If faith never encounters doubt, if truth never struggles with error, if good never battles with evil, how can faith know its own power? How can it enhance its power if it never exercises its perception? A faith that struggles with doubt becomes strong through that struggle.

Robert Schuller tells the story of a tornado that destroyed his family farm buildings. In half an hour nine freshly painted buildings were completely obliterated. Twenty-six years of hard labor had been wiped out. “Dad got out of the car, ordering us to wait, and walked with his cane around the clean-swept, tornado-vacuumed farmyard.” Doubts, I’m sure arose in his mind. “Why did God allow this to happen? Haven’t I served God faithfully? Doesn’t God care about me and my welfare? If God is real, why didn’t he stop this tornado?” As he picked through the trash, he found a piece of molded plaster that had hung on the kitchen wall. The motto said, “Keep looking to Jesus.” So, Schuller wrote, his Dad didn’t quit. With God on his side and, ‘looking to Jesus’, he could start over. And he did just that.

The faith of Schuller’s family stood a stern test that day and it survived. Without question, nothing could have tested their faith any stronger. Their faith gained strength because it had looked into the face of destruction and had not blinked.

Rufus Jones, the Quaker pastor and teacher in Maine once wrote, “A twice-born faith, a rebuilt faith, is superior to an inherited faith that has never stood the strain of a great testing storm. If you have not clung to a broken piece of your old ship in the dark night of the soul, your faith may not have the sustaining power to carry you through to the end of the journey.”

Fourth, doubt forces us to find reasons for our faith. Many deny that doubt has any value. Herbert Williams, in his book, No Room for Doubt, sums up this viewpoint. “Doubting can serve no useful purpose whatever, as it provides nothing we need in the challenging quest for answers. Doubt… is a negative attitude which cannot accomplish in the interest of positive inquiry into problems that are real, pressing, and ever-present.”

This kind of attitude flies in the face of the biblical approach where the apostles argued, debated, and discussed, with people of many faiths, in order to prove the validity of their claims. We cannot expect people to listen to our beliefs if we cannot explain the reasons for our faith. St. Peter wrote, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.”

Doubt forces us to express our belief in coherent and rational statements. Doubt makes us deal honestly with the troublesome issues of life. Faith does not require us to bury our heads in the sand lest we be disturbed. True faith will enable us to look difficulties in the eye, and respond with integrity to the truth we know. If you struggle with misgivings and uncertainties, do not be forced by a false sense of Christian piety to hide your doubts. Faithful men and women in history have struggled greatly with the fire of doubt burning within them.

“Like a fire that burns away the underbrush so new trees can reach new heights, our doubts can help us achieve a faith that grows stronger and reigns supreme in spite of the uncertainties we often face.” (Gary Parker)

I don’t believe everything people tell me. The world is filled with people trying to sell me something that will benefit them rather than me. I receive many phone calls and emails every day that are scams. A.I. creates much misinformation. Too many people are ripped off by con artists. If something is too good to be true it usually is. Doubt in these cases is very valuable. It may prevent you from losing your shirt. It is healthy to question the claims of others. Doubt can be very reasonable.

In the mean time, we return to the father who prayed, “I believe, help my unbelief.” His son was healed. What happened to his faith? What needs to happen to us that will bring us to seek help from Jesus? What is possible for us if we believe?

Perhaps you need to make this man’s prayer your own, and bring all your cares, concerns, fears and pains to him for healing. When you do so you will discover that “all things are possible to him who believes.” Prayer changes things. As Jesus said, “This kind [the evil spirit in the boy] can come out only by prayer.” We may try everything else in life, but prayer is our first and last resort. Our need, faith, and our doubt drives us to seek for help. When we do we discover that the Savior is there to heal.

C.S. Lewis tells the story of a military man who, though he confessed to being religious, had no time for doctrines such as found in the creeds. He preferred his religion to be mysterious and experiential, and did not want to know about the facts of the faith. His experience of God was more real to him than the words conveying the affirmations of the faith.

Lewis said that it was like looking at the Atlantic Ocean, and then looking at a map of the Atlantic Ocean. You turn from looking at real waves to looking at a bit of colored paper. “But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only colored paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way, it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. [The creeds] are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experiences of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God. If you want to get any further, you must use the map.”

The military officer’s religion led him nowhere. “In fact, that is just why a vague religion – all feeling God in nature, and so on – is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.”

Thomas, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, was a twin. We don’t hear of his twin, and we know nothing about his childhood. But we know that he also, was always asking questions. He never accepted anything without asking for an explanation. That is what got him a few extra lines in the Gospel of John.

It was recorded that on Easter Sunday Jesus appeared to the disciples in the Upper Room. He came and stood among them, spoke with them, and showed them his wounds. We read that the disciples were overjoyed when they saw him. He commissioned them in his service of preaching the Gospel of forgiveness of sins in the power of the Holy Spirit. But Thomas was not there. Why, we don’t know. When they saw him again the other disciples told him what had happened. They gave their first-hand testimony: “We have seen the Lord!” But Thomas was not easily persuaded. He wanted proof. “Unless I see with my own eyes the nail marks in his hand and put my own finger where the nails were, and put my own hand into his side, I will not believe it.”

This desire for first-hand verification is perfectly normal. It is especially understandable when extraordinary claims such as these are made. To have seen and spoken with someone who was certifiably dead cries out for some kind of proof. That is why it is so difficult for modern man to believe anything unless he has had direct experience of it. The resurrection of Jesus is no easier to believe today than it was two thousand years ago. Some people find it easier to believe than others. Thomas needed some proof. He was a doubter of so-called miraculous occurrences. Why was he such a doubter? Why do many people find it difficult to believe the testimony of others, the witness of history, the record of his post-resurrection appearances, the claims of Christ to be God in the flesh, the Lord of all, the conqueror of death and Hades, the authority of Holy Scripture? What causes some people to be congenital doubters?

Did Thomas suffer from existential angst? Philosophers explore the problem of having a fundamental sense of uncertainty about the reality of existence. Doubt and despair can be the result of a basic pessimism about the human condition. Modern atheistic philosophy, that denies any divine purpose, and defines life in terms of a biological determinism, breeds cynicism. Life that is lived on the surface, that seeks to escape boredom and emptiness through material acquisition and pleasure, is prone to perennial doubt. Doubt cannot be always kept at bay by distraction from anxiety that mindless activities afford.

Perhaps Thomas was plagued with troubling questions that he couldn’t ignore. Doubts are often rooted deep in the personality. Did Thomas suffer from emotional mood swings: a manic period when faith was strong, and a depressive period when faith was absent? When we feel good, and life is going well, faith is easy. But when we pass through periods of discouragement, doubts resurface. It is important to distinguish mood swings from genuine doubt. Our feelings have to be offered up to God, to be purified, so that we can experience peace. We can choose to be governed by our feelings or by our daily commitment to follow Jesus. Jesus said, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke [i.e. my teaching] upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Was Thomas at a turning point in his development and personal history? Different seasons of our lives affect our faith and our doubts. Changes in life lead to vulnerability which leaves us open to doubt. Transitions, a sense of danger, insecurity, loneliness, which Thomas must have been experiencing, can cause doubt and fear. Adolescence, mid-life crises, menopause, empty nests, illnesses and retirement bring stresses that cause us to doubt. As we age we ask, “Is there nothing more?” and we face the three big D’s: decline, depression and death.

Did the death of Jesus trigger some emotional connection in Thomas’s life? The loss of Jesus may have led him to contemplate other losses in his life, which he interpreted as abandonment by significant people, and consequent feelings of anger, or lack of value. Some doubts can be traced to painful chapters in our emotional history. Deaths of parents, siblings, or close friends in tragic circumstances, may have left unfinished business. The fact that Jesus had appeared to the other disciples and not him may have upset him. Was Jesus avoiding him? Was he not important? Why was he being put on the spot and expected to believe when the others had it easy? It could have looked to him as favoritism.

Pressure points and crisis events can shape our doubts. Job losses, illness, bereavements, tragedy of one kind or another, may push us to doubt. Loss of children or other people we love, often cause us to doubt that there is a God of love. Perhaps this is what led to Thomas’s doubting. He had undergone the stunning shock and stress of Jesus’ arrest, trial, torture and execution. This was a major life crisis for Thomas. All his hopes and dreams had crashed and burned.

Parental abuse causes distrust and doubt of any authority figures. “New York University psychology professor Paul Vitz, in his book Faith of the Fatherless, studied the childhood of several well-known atheists and saw strong evidence that their rejection of God is directly related to father pain: the death of a father or abuse or abandonment by their fathers. Vitz points out that Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who declared that ‘God is dead,’ lost his father at age four. Samuel Butler, skeptical British novelist, was often brutally beaten by his ‘pious’ father. Sigmund Freud said his father was a ‘pervert’ and built much of his psychological theory around father hatred. Joseph Stalin’s father beat him unmercifully. Madelyn Murray O’Hair once tried to kill her father with a butcher knife. Vitz suggests that after studying these and other ‘major historical rejecters of God …. We find a weak, dead or abusive father in every case.’ Consequently Vitz urges great compassion for atheists, because behind their unbelief, in all likelihood lies some painful memory. So as you examine your doubts, you may want to honestly confront the possibility that one of your roadblocks to faith may be some pain from the past.”

Dr. Lynn Anderson, president of Hope Network, claims that the pace of our lives breeds doubts. He calls it cognitive overload. The impact of the media upon us transforms every day into a crisis as we absorb the tragic events in the world through our television screens. We are overstimulated by our environment and overcommitted in our schedule. We keep ourselves busy so that we do not have to find time for reflecting and listening. Activism, no matter how well-intentioned, leaves life shallow. It can also leave us with faith that may appear to be a mile wide but may not be an inch deep. Cynicism and skepticism pours over us from the talking heads, and the experts. As in the garden of Eden, the tempter can stimulate these roots of doubt and encourage their growth so that we question the presence of God. The influence of evil seems more pervasive than the power of the goodness of God when we see innocent civilians and children killed or maimed by terrorists. “Where is God in all of that carnage?” we ask.

Henri Nouwen refers to this experience as ‘the absence of God’. But some of the times when God seems to be absent may actually be fulfilling his purpose. “His absence… is often so deeply felt that it leads to a new sense of His presence.”   When we feel that God is absent, he may be more completely and sharply focused in our conscious thoughts, more so than when we take for granted that he is very near. Nouwen writes,

“The mystery of God’s presence, therefore, can be touched only by a deep awareness of his absence. It is in the center of our longing for the absent God that we discover his footprints… In the patient waiting for the loved one, we discover how much he has filled our lives already. Just as the love of a mother for her son can grow deeper when he is far away, just as children can learn to appreciate their parents more when they have left the home, just as lovers can rediscover each other during long periods of absence, so our intimate relationship with God can become deeper and more mature by the purifying experience of his absence.”

When you consider your doubts, look for its roots in your basic temperament, or your particular stage in life, or to a negative experience either long past or recent. Doubt may have more to do with your personality or your personal history than it does with the facts, with the issue of truth, or the conflict between faith and knowledge.

Who knows what were the roots of Thomas’s doubts about the resurrection? Eventually he came to believe. Some of us take longer to process the information we need in order to experience the presence of Christ. That does not mean that we should give up or summarily reject the evidence we have in hand. It means that we need to be patient and humble enough to be open to what God might want to teach us.

A week later, the next Sunday, the first day of the week, the Lord’s day, when the disciples were gathered together again (the second Sunday in the Christian era), Jesus came and stood among them, as he does whenever his church gathers. He said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” When Thomas saw Jesus he acknowledged him with words of personal faith, “My Lord and my God.”

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Jesus says to every one, “Stop doubting and believe.” That means making a choice. Will I consciously believe, or will I choose to continue to doubt? Doubt is a decision, just as much as faith. Feelings of uncertainty or doubt, should not prevent me from making the decision to believe in Jesus and to follow him. Sometimes I have to act on my choices before the feelings will follow. The habit of keeping company with Jesus, will result in a secure relationship of love, which fosters faith. Walking in the way of Christ each day, can gradually dispel doubt, until it withers away through lack of attention. Faith needs to be fed, and doubt needs to be starved, through prayer, study, service, witness, and worship. In that way the past can be put behind me, and the future becomes an adventure of faith, with all the possibilities the kingdom of God promises. It is the only way to live.

O Almighty God, who brings good out of evil and turns the shadow of death into morning: Hear our prayers this day as we remember those of many nations and differing faiths whose lives were cut short by the fierce flames of anger and hatred. Hasten the time when the menace of war shall be removed. Cleanse both us and those perceived to be our enemies of all hatred and distrust. Pour out the spirit of peace on all the rulers of our world that we may be brought through strife to the lasting peace of the kingdom of your Son; Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

A few miles south of where I live on Amelia Island, BAE Systems, on Hecksher Drive in Jacksonville, has made a business of fitting out ships. Located on the St. John’s River, it has easy access to the Atlantic Ocean through Mayport. On May 26, 1987, the Nicor Navigator, owned and operated by the Columbus-America Discovery Group, slipped its moorings and headed out to test its crane and winch which was essential for towing the Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) it was using to locate the site of the S.S. Central America, which had sunk in a hurricane on September 12, 1857. The equipment failed, and they had to return to Jacksonville for repairs. On May 31, they departed Atlantic Marine a second time for the test site. Once again they had problems and had to return. On June 5, for the third time in ten days, a river pilot took them out from BAE Systems to the ocean.

Gary Kinder in his bestseller Ship of Gold In The Deep Blue Sea, tells the enthralling story of the loss of the Central America, and its eventual discovery in 8,000 feet of water 160 miles off Cape Henry, Norfolk, Virginia, by a group of scientists and investors headed by Tommy Thompson of Columbus, Ohio. Tommy worked in 1976 for Mel Fisher who, for seven years, tried to find the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Senor de Atocha, which sank off the Florida Keys in a hurricane in 1622. The Atocha carried 901 silver bars, 15 tons of ingot copper, 250,000 newly minted silver coins and 161 pieces of gold bullion, plus other rare artifacts, and jewelry. Mel Fisher did not find and recover the treasure until 1987.

Tommy went on to work for the Battelle Memorial Institute which engaged in research for government and private industry. His interest was in deep-ocean mining. While water covered seventy percent of the world’s surface, there had been little research done in deep water due to the hazardous environment and the lack of technology. Tommy set his goal on developing the technology to make deep-ocean research and recovery possible. In 1984, he selected the finding and recovery of the Central America as the ideal project to work on. He gathered together a group of venture capitalists who invested in the project which promised a 10,000 percent return.

The Central America was carrying gold and gold miners returning from the California goldfields. The ship picked up the cargo and passengers after they had transited across the Panama isthmus. The gold shipment was documented at up to $1.6 million in 1857 prices. Probably the passengers carried an equal amount in addition to the manifest. There was also an official secret shipment designed to shore up the faltering economy of New York. It was estimated at six hundred fifty-pound bar boxes, or another thirty thousand pounds of gold.

The potential investors grilled Tommy Thompson on the feasibility of the enterprise. Before they invested their capital they wanted to know the probability of being able to locate the wreck, overcome the legal issues, and secure the gold. Tommy said that it was sixty percent. Many experts they approached said that it couldn’t be done. There were too many variables and challenges to locating and recovering at such a depth. Government agencies had spent multi-millions trying to do it to recover submarines, and had limited success. There was a lot of skepticism, and Tommy himself was honest enough to admit his own agnosticism, but he was convinced that the project was possible, despite the risks involved.

Gary Kinder expressed Tommy’s attitude, “Don’t know if we can find the ship. Think we can, but don’t know. Don’t know what the site will be like. Think we do, but don’t know. Don’t know if we have the technology to recover the gold. Think we have, but don’t know. We do know the ship sank, that it carried at least three tons of gold, that it rests in about eight thousand feet of water, that no one else has recovered the treasure. And I think I can put together a project to do what no one else has done before: find the remains of a three-hundred-foot, wooden-hulled ship in a stretch of ocean bigger than the state of Rhode Island and go down to the bottom and pluck the treasure from the debris with a robot. Don’t know if we can keep the treasure. Think we can, but don’t know. Don’t know how to market the treasure. We’ll figure that out.”

I count nine “don’t knows” in that paragraph! What faith is required to undertake such a project, and to risk investing thousands of dollars in it? There is no certainty here. There is no proof that this will be successful. Yet many people invested their time and money in it because there was the possibility of gain and glory.

Agnostics will say that they cannot believe in God or Christ because they don’t know if he really exists, or they are not sure that Jesus Christ was divine. Yet Tommy Thompson decided to pursue what he didn’t know until he did know, and he could be sure. I want to pursue the buried treasure of faith to see how we can be sure that it exists and that we can discover it for ourselves.

The Bible says: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1)

Tommy could not see the Central America, but he was sure going to try and find it. We cannot see God in a physically, scientifically-verifiable form, but faith is the willingness to seek until we find.

Tommy did not find the Central America in 1987. The following year he acquired a new ship which he sailed up the St. John’s River in Jacksonville, to Green Cove Springs, where it was transformed into the Arctic Discoverer. All winter he and his research team had been examining the sonar records for the fourteen hundred square miles searched in 1987. They identified an image which strongly resembled what they were looking for and determined that they would explore that target. More investors had to be attracted to finance this next stage of the project. The original investors kicked in another $1.5 million and new investors added another million dollars.

On August 19, a tug pulled Arctic Discoverer from the dock in Green Cove Springs, and towed it to Jacksonville, where it continued to be refitted at a marina near the mouth of the St. John’s River for the next week. On August 28, the Arctic Discoverer traveled out of its dock through Mayport into the Atlantic. In September, they located the ship, whose remains covered an area of over ten acres.

On October 1, they discovered the treasure. “The bottom was carpeted with gold,” said Tommy. “Gold everywhere, like a garden. The more you looked, the more you saw gold growing out of everything, embedded in all the wood and beams. It was amazing, clear back in the far distance bars stacked on the bottom like brownies, bars stacked like loaves of bread, bars that appear to have slid into the corner of a room. Some of the bars formed a bridge, all gold bars spanning one area of treasure over here and another area over here, water underneath, and the decks collapsed through on both sides. Then there was a beam with coins stacked on it, just covered, couldn’t see the beam it had so many coins on it.”

“So many bricks lay tumbled upon another at myriad angles that the thirty-foot pile appeared to be the remnants of an old building just demolished. Except these were bricks of gold: bricks flat, bricks stacked, bricks upright, bricks cocked on top of other bricks. And coins single, coins stacked, coins once in stacks now collapsed into spreading piles.”

One of the largest bars of California gold was 754.95 oz., $14,045 value in 1857. Today in bullion value alone, it could be worth $250,000. James Lamb the coin expert from Christie’s said that it was “impossible to describe the significance, the potential monetary value, the general excitement of this find. All of these hitherto extraordinarily rare, desirable artifacts in perfect condition, in huge piles is just… it’s beyond my imagination.” The total value of the treasure is still undetermined.

It is impossible to completely determine the existence of God, the atoning efficacy of the Cross, the truth of the resurrection of Jesus and its effects on those who believe. Thomas, one of the original twelve disciples of Jesus, doubted until he could see the risen Jesus with his own eyes and touch him with his own hands. Yet Tommy Thompson and his investors, put aside their doubts and were willing to wager millions on being able to find gold. They were willing to take years to seek until they found what they were looking for. What does this say to us about how much we are willing to invest in seeking first the buried treasure of the eternal kingdom of heaven Jesus proclaimed?

The value, if it is real, of what St. Paul described as “the unsearchable riches of Christ”, must be worth all the effort, all the giving, all the questioning, all the exploring, all the praying, all the learning, all the serving, all the time, that is required. Not to seek it, and then to find out after death that it was there all the time for us to discover (“The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming.”), would be a terrible omission, a lack of courage, and fill us with eternal regret.

Those who deny the existence of God, and the truth of Christ, persuade many that it is a foolish and unprofitable exercise to seek the certainty that faith brings. But that has always been the counsel of those who dismiss explorers and inventors as people who waste their time chasing up blind alleys. Settling for the immediate and the obvious has never satisfied the human spirit. There always have been those who have pushed the envelope, who have gone where no one has gone before. Years later posterity hails them as the true visionaries who made possible the advances in technology that created the environment in which our civilization has developed. Seeking for faith in Christ is no different from seeking for a truth, if it exists, that can change our world for good. The rewards are worth it: eternal life, heaven, forgiveness, empowerment by God’s Spirit, divine love and acceptance, hope, joy, human fulfillment, and ultimate justice, are a few of the treasures to be found.

Gary Kinder closes his remarkable account with these words: “They had proved the experts wrong. You could work on the bottom of the deep ocean, do intricate work carefully and heavy work delicately, and you didn’t have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do it. You just had to shed old ways of thinking and reexamine old assumptions and do it smart from the beginning. You had to keep diverging, even beyond the point where it all became difficult and confusing. That’s where Tommy lives, and he made those around him live there too, some for far longer than is comfortable for most people. Yet just on the other side of that juncture is where impossibility sometimes vanishes and the world can be seen in a new way. … Historic ship recovery was really an adventure in thinking, a way of looking at the world. Finding the treasure of the Central America was a goal, but it wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was to unveil the treasures of the deep ocean, to enhance our understanding of history, to advance marine archeology, to further science, to form new corporate cultures, to develop technology. Going after treasure was like plowing and planting a field. Tommy had broached the idea …back in 1985. ‘If you do that,’ he said, ‘all kinds of things can blossom.’”

These words can provide us with an analogy. The exercise of faith sometimes requires shedding old ways of thinking and re-examining old assumptions. Sometimes we have to get out of our comfort zones. Yet, when we get to the assurance of faith we find that impossibility vanishes, and the world can be seen in a new way. Faith is an adventure in thinking, a way of looking at the world. The purpose of following Christ, and seeing life through his eyes, is to unveil the treasures of, what C.S. Lewis called ‘deep heaven’, to enhance our understanding of reality, to advance the kingdom of God, and to further the work of Gospel. It is like going after buried treasure.

Daniel Jupp PhD., is an English political commentator who posts on jupplandia@substack.com. I am an admirer of his brilliant analysis of our culture. He claims to be an atheist but his honesty compels him to make the case for the importance of Christianity in our lives. His post on September 2, 2026, entitled BUILDING A SOCIETY POSSESSED BY DEMONS, reminds me of Dostoevsky’s novel from which he derives his title. I share it with you and commend his blogposts.

I suppose the difference between myself and many other atheists is not that I have any belief or faith, it is that as a cultural and social conservative it seems to me that all human beings and all societies require a faith system, a meta-narrative about reality, life, death and the way we should behave, and that the absence of a faith system is disastrous and unsustainable.

Individuals can in many cases muddle along confined to a limited, materialist understanding of the cosmos. It’s not very pleasant, and it’s not something that signals greater insight or brilliance, since I think many atheists actually get to their position on a basis of a feeling, just as much as many believers do.

Societies cannot ‘muddle along’ without a belief system. If they abandon one God, another takes his place. If they reject a religious faith, a secular belief system that may well be more fanatical becomes dominant instead. Either an alien religion that is more aggressive wins, or an extreme political ideology offers meaning in exchange for belief in it, instead. We are seeing both these effects in modern western society.

The formal arguments for atheism tend to be reductive, arrogant and rather simplistic, appealing to reductive, arrogant and rather simplistic people, the kind of people produced in a factory line by modern universities full of ideas which are just as evidence free and often considerably more malign than even the most obscure points of theology.

I’ve found many atheists are in fact rigidly orthodox, narrow minded bigots, especially professional atheists, and are people possessed of an unwarranted sense of intellectual superiority simply because they have made a choice on a single topic that is, in secular societies, more dominant than its opposite. Rather like progressive leftists, they display all of the personal and ideological characteristics they claim to abhor and reject. And it’s not surprising then that there is a great deal of overlap, politically, between the ardent atheist and the radical progressive.

Atheism becomes just another smug orthodoxy of the modern era, focused on sneering at and tearing down what our ancestors built and cared about, a destructive cultural vandalism that doesn’t fulfill any of the utopian promises of greater rationality, greater freedom of conscience, and greater individual liberty it pretends to represent. The performative atheist is more often simply a nihilist, or a dishonest assistant of the capture of our culture by rival and alien theologies of far more malign nature than our own discarded beliefs.

For any cultural conservative, it’s clear that western civilization had at one stage built a society of enviable merit, and that this society, this civilization, achieved more than any other towards the real betterment of mankind and the real improvement of the human condition…..a success that other societies did not achieve, and that other belief systems, secular or religious, have not equaled. A fair record of western civilization shows far more good than bad, far more of benefit than detriment, and achievements that were both material and moral which contemporary critics demean, slander and deny. It also shows Christianity, the moral lessons, social effects, and behavioral and social conditioning derived from Christian ethics, as integral to this success.

In a purely material or mechanistic understanding of the cosmos, Man has little significance, either at an individual level or even on the level of our entire species. For all that an atheist like Richard Dawkins can talk about the wonders of the universe just as much as a religious person can, for all that my eyes and brain as an atheist can look at a scene in nature with the same respect for the beauty of creation that a believer may possess, for all that Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox can talk about the mind boggling immensity of the universe in reverential tones, the human being and the universe deprived of a God IS deprived of a sense of meaning too.

Even if atheism is right, even if a scientific, mechanistic understanding of the universe where forces act remorselessly in ways determined by physics and where life is generated by accident and chance rather than by design and intent is true, it is not a comforting truth. Parts of the end result can be beautiful, and Dawkins in particular seems to have an ironically religious feeling of awe when discussing the operation of evolution and the natural adaptations of animal life, but the blind self generated cosmos that works like a self created machine is, for most of us, a cold and abstract universe to live in. If the immensity of space is deliberate, it is a wondrous feat, a spectacular enchantment. If it is an explosion birthed from nothing, it is much more likely to be viewed negatively, in an emotional way, as an immensity within which we are spectacularly insignificant.

The psychological difference between the universe was created so that creatures such as you could exist, and the universe is an accident in which you are just one of the smallest random specks in an emptiness beyond your comprehension, is, to paraphrase the inarticulate Brian Cox talking about the universe, ‘really, really big’. The ultimate expression of what a truly mechanistic vision means comes not in science or religion, but in fiction. HP Lovecraft’s creation of a genre of ‘cosmic horror’ expresses an awareness of just how pitiless, meaningless and worthless existence becomes if we fully embrace and live the idea that there is no God and the universe doesn’t care about anything.

At either extreme of the reality we inhabit-at the smallest organisms level of a virus or a plague and at the largest scale level of the vast gaps between worlds-humanity becomes irrelevant, morality becomes meaningless, and life becomes purposeless. There is no beauty, even evolutionary beauty, that a Dawkins can ascribe to a virus of replicating acellular infectious agents eating the flesh of a living innocent, nor would we find much beauty in our Earth being pummeled by extinction event meteorites or the forces of a black hole being applied to our solar system while we, briefly, inhabit it. The end point of the mechanistic universe is the understanding that your entire planet, your entire species, and with a more particular yet even more crushing certainty your entire life, means nothing.

The only human minds that can fully accommodate this kind of ‘truth’, outside of fictional literature, are insane ones. The only human beings who live by a full realization of mechanistic meaninglessness are the most evil human beings.

Because if you live out this throneless universe deprived of gods, you live out the behavior of monsters. In reality, most people thankfully act as if lives have meaning and purpose, and as if something prevents us from committing vile acts even where our actions are unobserved or our chances of human punishment are slight. We act as if a God might judge our actions, even when we don’t formally believe that such a God is possible. We act as if certain behaviors denote the monstrous and the unforgivable, the evil and the demonic, even if we don’t think a divine judgement awaits us or a human judgement will find us.

But this can change. This is changing.

It is possible to construct a society of demons, and this is what we are doing.

Demons act fully on the mechanistic consciousness. They emerge when societal taboos are abandoned. They emerge when extreme ideologies flourish. They emerge when people stop acting as if a God might judge them, and they emerge when people start acting as if they are the God judging others. A Demon is a perfect solipsist, for whom all external reality, including other people, exists solely by his or her perception, and solely for his or her enjoyment, profit or disposal. Nothing outside the Demon’s wants has meaning or value, and even his or her professed political or religious affiliations are simply the vehicles best suited for the delivery of their most loathsome desires.

The deliberate torture, murder, or sexual exploitation of children should always qualify for the label of demonic, should always suggest to us an act by which the person acting loses their own claim to sanity or humanity. We apply demonic to actions which are innately and fundamentally inhuman, to acts where insanity and evil are essentially the same, and where no context, no excuse, and no circumstance can mitigate the deserved revulsion the act occasions.

And we are producing more and more people capable of such acts, and more and more people capable of defending and agreeing with those who perform them. There is a serious issue now where frankly millions of people seem to be evil and insane enough to side with demonic behavior. And I do think this issue relates to religion.

When we abandoned our God, we invited in demons, and now a significant percentage of our population are, for want of a less supernatural term, possessed.

This is not a purely political issue. It is a moral and spiritual degeneracy at work.

My father was an atheist, just like me. I have never known a more moral man. I have never known anyone else live so much as if his actions could be judged at some point in a court where no human error exists. He could give a good accounting of himself in any weighing of the scales of good and evil. He acted as though his actions would be counted and weighed by a judge incapable of error and immune to deception.

Some people can intellectually act as if there is no God and rationally think that death ends a life with nothing after, and still hold themselves to a very high standard of moral excellence. But I believe these people are rare.

Many other people cannot. Many other people, when the culturally inherited belief system is gone, would be driven mad in a depressive sense without a framework of meaning beyond the merely mechanistic, and the terrible irony is that these people will embrace outward facing, violent madness and evil if it gives them a sense of meaning beyond themselves. They will listen to the darkest whisper in preference to the eternal silence. They will embrace the most blood soaked foreign cult. They will make a religion of their science and a science of their hypocrisy. They will tell themselves that evil is good, destruction is creation, and orthodox fanaticism is rebellious free thinking.

They will find meaning for themselves, meaning to hoard and accumulate, even if every coin of it is a false currency built on lies. They might decide that physical characteristics of identity like race or gender deserve their absolute loyalty, where sanity, decency and old moral standards do not.

They will welcome demonic possession, and call it an awakening.

How else can we accurately describe what is happening in a society where the most basic and fundamental moral realities aren’t accessible or dominant anymore, and where Islamic terrorists can live stream their rapes, tortures and bestial murders of women and children and receive the support and sympathy of much of the modern world?

We can know that when we replaced wonder and morality with mechanism and relativism, when we stopped insisting on certain moral truths and boundaries, the psychological effect on western consciousness was analogous to the effect that an open border has on crime and justice in objective reality. In both cases the lowering of the traditional defense is a welcoming of evil and insanity. In both cases innocents suffer while liars assert that the damage isn’t real.

]]> https://www.tedschroder.com/daniel-jupp-on-atheism/feed/ 3 3979 https://www.tedschroder.com/love-as-debt/ https://www.tedschroder.com/love-as-debt/#respond Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:15:03 +0000 https://www.tedschroder.com/?p=3977

“Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor. Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another.” (Romans 13:7-8)

Kierkegaard paraphrases St. Paul: “Owe no man anything, what you have borrowed from him, what you have promised him, what he rightfully may demand of you in return. If possible, owe no man anything, no obligation, no service, no sympathy in joy or sorrow, no leniency in judging, no help in life, no advice in dangers, no sacrifice, even the most difficult – no, in all these things owe no man anything. But nevertheless be in debt which amid all this you have by no means desired to get out of and before God have by no means been able to pay off, the debt of love to one another….Usually we think the task is to get out of debt, whatever the debt is, a money debt, a debt of honor, a debt involving a promise – in short, whatever the debt is the task is always rather to get out of debt, the sooner the better. But here it should be the task, therefore an honor, to be in debt.” (Works of Love)

Now I must say that I find this idea unsettling. I do not like to be in debt to anyone. I do not like to be beholden to anyone. It is much easier to believe that “It is more blessed to give than to receive”! My egotistical nature wants to be self-sufficient, independent, and not to be in debt. I was raised by parents who warned me about getting into debt. There was a pride in being able to pay your bills when they were due and not past due. But such an attitude can keep us from feeling any obligation to others. We feel that we do not owe them anything, so we keep our distance from them. Such distancing can prevent us from getting to know them, and can protect us from caring for them.

There are some people we feel obligated to repay the debt of love we owe them. We may feel that we are in debt to our parents, because our parents have loved us first. They brought us into the world, they cared for us in infancy, they nurtured us, they fed and clothed us, and supported us through our childhood and youth as we went to school, and matured into adulthood. We have photos of ourselves in their arms, and by their sides as we grew up. We may have wanted to repay them for their love. But love cannot be repaid. To think of love in this way is to compare it with a bookkeeping relationship – a bill is submitted and it must be paid; if love was shown to us, it must be repaid with love. We cannot think of coming into debt by receiving love. Sometimes needy parents feel that their children owe them some consideration as they age. Sometimes we may feel that our children owe us. But St. Paul is not talking here of repaying the debt of love. There is no way we can repay, for loving others is a debt that can never be satisfied. It is in loving others that we come into a debt that can never be calculated.

Why are we obligated to love others? “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers….This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him…Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”

There is never a time when we can say that we have fulfilled our debt to love one another. If Christ is in us, then his love is lived through us. We can never stop loving somebody and say, ‘I have loved enough.’ Just as there is never a time when we can say that God has loved us enough and he does not have to love us anymore. God loves us to the end and beyond. As John records Jesus’s attitude to his disciples at the Last Supper: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the last.” He loves us at our worst. He loves the world in its messiness, its rebellion, its rejection of him. He loves those who hate him. We can do no less. We have an infinite debt to love one another.

Does this mean that others have a blank check on our love? No. Does this mean that there are no limits to what others can draw on our love? No. We are called to love our neighbor ‘as ourselves’, not more than ourselves. To love others more than yourself would mean that you would be unwilling to refuse them anything they asked, even if you think it is harmful. To love others more than yourself would be to put them on a pedestal as someone to be idolized. That would be blasphemy. It is not love to indulge human weakness, or a demand, or blackmail that love will be withheld. Love for others does not mean fulfilling all their desires and needs. Our love for others is determined by what would constitute proper care and prevent possible harm. That may mean denying requests for money from an alcoholic, or drug addict, who would use the funds for their habit. It may mean confronting a spouse who is obsessing about an issue that is consuming him, or abusive in their behavior.

Love for others does not require us to beggar ourselves. We must care for ourselves, and maintain ourselves so that we can continue to love others. We can only love others if we have something to give. Love may require sacrifice, even self-denial, but it does not mean being reduced to having to depend upon others because we have exhausted our own resources in trying to help others. Governments that overspend in order to provide welfare benefits have to overtax or borrow to avoid being accused of lack of love or concern are irresponsible.

We are able to love others because the Author of our life is also the Source of love in us. God has loved us first. God is the origin and source of the love in us which we are called to share with others. We can only love because we are loved. We cannot love from our own resources, on our own initiative. We are given love to give to others. Therefore we can pay this debt from God’s bank of love. He gives us a line of credit on his love. We can draw on it all we want to give love to others.

Jesus said, “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Just as Jesus drew on the love of his Father to love others, so we can draw on the love of Jesus to love others. This is the difference between a disciple of Christ and a humanist ethical person. The believer in Christ does not rely on his own strength to love others. He calls upon the empowering of the Holy Spirit. “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us.”

In what currency is the debt of love to be paid? It is the currency Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13:4,5 – “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

Practically speaking, it means that whomever we meet in this life, whomever we have occasion to relate to, we, as the followers of Christ, acknowledge that we have a debt to pay to them – to love them. We owe them, whomever they are, however casual the acquaintance, the obligation of our love. We can never say that we owe them nothing. This attitude characterized Jesus. It is why people were struck by him, were drawn to him. He treated people with love. It did not matter who they were: a servant, a prostitute, a nobleman, a foreigner, a rich man or a poor man. He treated them all the same – with love. We are expected to do no less.

GUIDE FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. Why is it an honor to be in debt to love our neighbor?

2. Why is it easier to believe that it is more blessed to give than to receive?

3. How does the belief that we do not owe others anything distance ourselves from them?

4. What people have you wanted to repay for their love? What is the danger of comparing relationships with bookkeeping?

5. Read 1 John 3:16;4:9,11. Why are we obligated to love others?

6. How does God’s example prevent us from claiming that we have loved enough?

7. What does the distinction to love our neighbor ‘as ourselves’ and not more than ourselves mean to you?

8. “We must care for ourselves, and maintain ourselves so that we can continue to love others.” How does this affect how we can love others who selfishly demand more than we can handle?

9. How can we draw on God’s bank of love?

10. How does the example of Jesus affect how we love others?

“Love never fails.” (1 Corinthians 13:8) Divine love stands forever, for God is love, and only God is eternal. Everything that is created is contingent, dependent, temporary, mortal. Therefore only love from God, love that is given by God, love that partakes of the character of God, can never fail.

It is this love, the sharing of God’s love with his children that never fails. If we want our love to never fail, then we will want our love to be drawn from God’s love. When God is the source of our love, then our love cannot be defeated by anything.

Love is permanent. “Many waters cannot quench love.” (Song of Songs) Love cannot be drowned or destroyed. This love is eternal. This is what William Penn (1644-1718) meant when he prayed: “Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only an horizon, and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. Lift us up, strong Son of God, that we may see further, cleanse our eyes that we may see more clearly, and draw us closer to yourself that we may know ourselves to be nearer to our loved ones who are with you.”

Love never fails – it is a comfort and strength when we are threatened with the evils of life: despondency, terror, anxiety, and uncertainty. Love is the spring in the desert which never fails, which can be relied upon to sustain you. When this love is expressed it never fails the test, it never runs out, it can be relied upon.

To illustrate love’s permanence Paul contrasts it with three gifts prized most highly by the Corinthians. Prophecy is a clear word from God uttered under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by prophets and preachers. It is extremely valuable. We all need to hear the Word of God. Yet prophecies will cease when we are ushered into the presence of God. Prophecy will no longer be necessary.

The same can be said of the gift of tongues. They will one day be stilled. There will be no need of a prayer or evangelistic language to communicate with God or about the wonders of God when you are in his immediate presence. The gift of tongues can be a private ecstatic experience. The gift of love is meant to help us relate to others. Love is the true and fullest manifestation of the Spirit’s power. Jesus said, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

The gift of words of knowledge will pass away. In heaven our knowledge will be of no value. When we are with God and know him who is love, we will not need the gift of knowledge for we shall be experiencing reality. Love is greater than all other achievements. Love never fails when the value of other achievements fades. All accumulated knowledge will be unnecessary, out-of-date and redundant. No amount of talent which we may prize in this life, which the world values and rewards, can compare with love.

Love is superior to prophecies, tongues and knowledge. They are partial, and love is perfection. Even the most sophisticated knowledge we attain on earth is partial. The more we learn, the more we recognize how little we know. It is the same with prophecy. God reveals to us only those things we need to know. In this life we never have a complete understanding of his will. But one day we will enter into a fuller revelation – “when perfection comes.” This is the goal and aim of all human experience. It is the end of all things, the fulfillment of God’s purpose for us and the universe. When that happens and God’s will is perfectly done, then all this world’s partial achievements will fall away, inconsequential before God’s final order.

The same point can be made in the contrast between childhood and adulthood. “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” The way a child thinks is contrasted with the way an adult thinks. When he matured he repudiated his childishness. The contrast is between this life and the next. Certain things valuable in this life have no place in the next. Some things remain permanently valuable.

To underline his reasoning he changes to the subject of vision. Our vision here and now is partial. It is very much like looking at things in a mirror. Mirrors in those days were normally made of polished metal. They gave only a poor reflection. In such a mirror you could only see obscurely, in a distorted fashion. At best we see a reflection. We do not see accurately. But when the Lord returns for us and ushers in the new creation, we will see clearly, as face to face. Our vision will be perfect.

In other words, in the present age our knowledge is partial. It is part of life that we struggle to attain more complete knowledge by the slow and laborious processes of learning. But we never attain complete knowledge in this life. In the age to come it will be different. We shall know as we have been fully known by God. God’s knowledge of us is complete. There is nothing about us that God does not know.

The apostle John epitomized this never-failing love. He became known as the “apostle of love.” When he wrote his Gospel he referred to himself in the third-person as “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” in the Upper Room, at the foot of the Cross, at the empty tomb, and in Galilee after the resurrection. When he wrote his first epistle he described love as the central feature of God and Christian believers: “Dear friends, let us love one another, love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” Like Paul, he contrasted such love with the passing attractions of this life: “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him….The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”

There is much in this world to love. It is so easy to be seduced by the spirit of the world into desiring those things which promise satisfaction, but in reality are ephemeral. Too many times we can choose to put our preoccupations before our relationships. We can become obsessed with the tasks, with the activities, that feed our egos. Our goals can control us. In life we make choices about what we value. We choose what is most important to us. We can choose to love the world and its desires, but it will pass away. Jesus came that we might receive God’s love, and learn to love one another as he loved us. This love will never fail. It will never pass away. Choose love – the love of God – the love of others – the love of Christ. It alone is permanent.

Prayers:

O Love most powerful, strengthen me. O Love most sweet, let me taste of your goodness. O Love most dear, let me live for you alone. O Love most faithful, comfort and support me. O Love most companionable, accompany all my deeds. O Love most victorious, persevere with me to the end, for your own name’s sake. (Gertrude of Helfta 1256-1302)

Let me walk in the way you love, O God. Let me love you for yourself. Let me love you in all things. Let me taste the sweetness of your love and let it work its beauty in me, until I love with that divine love with which you love me; through Christ our Lord. (Gertrude More 1606-33)

Lord, fill us with the joy of your great love; let our minds meditate on it, let our tongues speak of it, let our hearts love it, let our minds preach it, let our souls hunger for it, and let our whole being desire it, until we enter into your glory and see you face to face. (Anselm of Canterbury 1033-1109)

GUIDE FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. Why does love have to be Divine for it to be permanent?
2. Compare Song of Songs 6:7 and William Penn’s prayer. What do they say to you?
3. How is love more permanent than prophecy?
4. How is love more permanent than the gift of tongues?
5. How is love more permanent than knowledge?
6. Read 1 Corinthians 13:11. What does the contrast between childhood and adulthood, this life and the next have to teach us about love?
7. Read 1 Corinthians 13:12. What does the comparison of ‘now’ and ‘then’ seeing and knowing tell us about loving others?
8. How does the realization that we are ‘fully known’ help us to love?
9. Read 1 John 2:15,17. How do we avoid loving the world or anything in the world?
10. How do we choose to make loving others important to us?

Marie Kawthar Daouda is a Lecturer in French at Oriel College, Oxford University. Born and raised in Morocco in a bilingual French and Moroccan Arabic family she enrolled in the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV in Paris at 17 and completed her doctorate in French and Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne. Her just published book, NOT YOUR VICTIM: How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us, deserves to be read by all of us concerned about current events and education. Her thesis is that “the narrative according to which all the evil in the world is the result of the involvement of the white Western man is infantilizing, historically erroneous, and nurtures the very prejudices it claims to fight. It is culturally divisive, and valorizes victimhood above individual and collective agency. Moreover, it entertains the idea that members of ethnic minorities can only succeed and thrive if and when white people express their regret for the colonial past.”

The call to ‘decolonize’ history by attributing evils of the past on former white supremacists and seeking reparations and blame to create guilt on Europeans and North Americans reveals ignorance and a condescending attitude towards the Global South. Bemoaning the alleged victimhood of the colored races and putting them in the category of the oppressed only serves to assert the moral superiority of the left-leaning Western liberal elite. Rousseau’s view of the Noble Savage obscures the realities of slave-owning African and Asian cultures. The Global South has never been a utopia. The transatlantic trade appears as the original sin of the West, with no regard to the long history of the slave trade in Africa by Africans, or to the enslavement of white people throughout history. The toppling of statues in the USA and the UK was not about history but about present political and social issues. The wish to destroy symbols of the past is rooted in the need to scapegoat something in order to legitimize the passage into a new era. How can we say we are good? How can we signal that we are not racist? Throw our sins on a statue, of course, then have that statue thrown into a river. The architectural history of the West is full of echoes of the past that cannot, and will not, be made comfortable to everyone. No era in history is perfect. The past is a violent place, an ‘uncomfortable’ realization for some. Some people feel threatened by visual traces of our history. What will our heirs feel about our generation? Will they judge us and cancel us too?

Proponents of critical race theory encourage self-depreciation in order to gain popularity. Robin Di Angelo writes in White Fragility, “White identity is inherently racist. To be less white is to be less racially oppressive. To be less white is to be open to, interested in, and compassionate toward the racial realities of people of color.” The sacrifice of Western culture on the altar of guilt about our racial and imperial past ends up being just as racist as any historical crime it seek to expiate.

The progressive culture wishes to see everything in terms of tensions between the oppressor and the oppressed. Nowadays victimhood is the spirit of the age that seems to grasp young adults and throw them into fits of rage on TikTok, around statues, or facing protests of trans-exclusionary radical feminists. The feeling of victimhood is contagious, and just like hysteria, it is likely to be mainly in your head, and to get better once you accept that you are unhappy, not sick. Race occupies a special category among the victimhood labels. It is immutable.

Cultural levels in education have been lowered in the name of inclusion. The progressive left, wishes to fabricate equality by engineering an artificial equality of outcome. We must all be the same. We are now expected to be as mediocre as everyone else. Imagine growing up surrounded by the lullabies of white guilt, telling you that everything you do as a white person, is inherently evil, conditioned by centuries of evil, and bound to perpetuate evil; and that all you can do is apologize and turn your life into a long string of reparations for the sins of your forefathers.

Secular thought is unable to address the problem of evil without reverting to pre-Christian mechanisms of scapegoating. To a Christian, and to a Christian society, the horrors of life were made to make sense by the belief that God himself went through each and every one of them to set us free from the fear of death, the desire for revenge, and the tyranny of envy. All the ethical norms that govern modern liberal democracies, even the very idea of human rights and human dignity, bear deep within them that trace of a loving intelligence that found no other way to tell its creatures about its love for them than to take human flesh and die.

The best way to put an end to the endless grievances of victimhood culture is to remind ourselves that life is good. What is the point in living in an ethnically diverse country if everyone is expected to have the same view that everything is a power struggle, and that nothing means anything at all. People in the West are starved for meaning. The victimhood narrative makes an attempt at filling a religious void. The sense of meaning is essential to happiness. For Pascal, that wish for happiness, which he saw as a wish for the knowledge of God, is impossible to forego. Our Western culture traces a quest for the only thing that could ever satisfy a human heart: the truth of divine, sacrificial love, for each and every one of us. Christianity alone teaches us that no one is blameless, yet everyone is priceless in the eyes of a God who died for love. The peace so many of us yearn for can only be found through an individual encounter with the only spotless victim.

I have not done justice to Marie’s narrative and commend you read the 162 pages. It is a rich response to many of our current political and social conflicts.

“Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else is fallen.” (1 Corinthians 13:7, J.B.Phillips)

Paul is indicating “an active, vigorous endurance, not a passive, resigned acceptance of all that happens. It describes the soldier in a keenly contested conflict who battles on undismayed. He does not allow the difficulties of the moment to rob him of strength and purpose; he fights on unflinchingly. So it is with love. Love’s endurance is a positive acceptance of life with all its difficulties, not a passive acquiescence in things as they are. Love does more than put up with life’s hardship; it grows and develops as it struggles against them. Love sees problems positively – as valuable tests that refine it and proves its worth.” (Leon Morris, Testaments of Love)

Love is not just grimly putting up with a difficult relationship or situation, enduring it, persevering with it because you think it is the right thing to do; it is approaching the relationship or situation as a mission to be accomplished, an objective to be reached, a challenge to be conquered. Perseverance has the backbone of courage. Love enables us to have the courage to endure and succeed in the face of all that is painful. Courage is the inner power to resist the painful experiences of life by facing up to the evil that attacks us, and not surrendering.

I saw this courage in my mother-in-law who devotedly nursed her husband, suffering from multiple sclerosis, for over twenty years.

Jesus said, “He who stands firm [endures] to the end will be saved.” Jesus, the incarnation of the love of God, endured to the end. He was courageous in the face of torture, agony, betrayal, rejection, and death. He did not seek to escape from persecution, and injustice. He set his face toward Jerusalem with the knowledge that he would go through the Cross to get to the Resurrection and the fulfillment of his salvation purpose.

We are called to face our difficulties in the same manner. When we seek to follow him and be his disciples we can likewise draw on his courageous love to persevere in the face of suffering, because we see beyond the trials to the victory. At the end of each letter to the seven churches in Asia, Jesus promises: “To him who overcomes, I will give the right to …eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God…will not be hurt at all by the second death….I will give authority over the nations….I will never blot out his name from the book of life but will acknowledge his name before my Father and his angels…I will make a pillar in the temple of my God….I will write on him my new name…I will give the right to sit with me on my throne.”

John Chrysostom calls perseverance “a fortress that is never taken, a harbor that knows no storms, the queen of virtues, the foundation of right actions, peace in war, calm in tempest, security in plots,” and neither the violence of man nor the powers of the evil one can injure it. It is the quality which keeps a man on his feet with his face to the wind. It is the virtue which can transmute the hardest trial into glory because beyond the pain it sees the goal.

“Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be men of courage, be strong. Do everything in love.” Love without strength is mere sentimentality. Strength without love can become aggressiveness that rides rough-shod over others. The combination of the two is a twofold cord which cannot be broken. We are called to be men and women of courage, to be strong, to do everything in love. What a high calling this is. To be a Christian in these terms is to be someone of consequence, someone who will accomplish something important. It is a noble calling, of heroic dimensions. There is nothing wimpy about it. Love that always perseveres resonates with strength.

“Be strong and courageous” is the exhortation of Moses to Joshua, accompanied by the promise, “the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you or forsake you.” Love is strong and courageous because God goes with us, and will never forsake us. We are not alone. God the Omnipotent, the Almighty, is with us.

The image is a military one. The core values of the United States Marine Corps are Honor, Courage, and Commitment. Those are also the core values of the Christian. We are committed to love of God and neighbor. We honor that commitment by having the courage to continue to love when the going gets tough, when life is difficult, when everything seems to be against us, when we are tempted to quit, when people let us down, and God seems to be absent. Edgar Guest once wrote:

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will

When the road you’re trudging seems all up hill

When funds are low, and the debts are high

And you want to smile, but you have to sigh

When care is pressing you down a bit

Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.

Success is failure turned inside out

The silver tint of clouds of doubt

And you never can tell how close you are

It may be near when it seems so far

So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit

It’s when things seem worse

That you must not quit.

Nathaniel Fick, in One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, recounted how the stress of continuous action in Afghanistan and Iraq, under adverse and deadly circumstances led some officers to avoid further action because they were exhausted. Their commanding officer chastised them for transferring their own fatigue onto troops who were capable of more than they knew. “You are tired, and those Marines are capable of more than they know.” We can make excuses for ourselves so that we can under-perform in the battles of life. We are capable of more than we know when we are put to the test. All too often the battles are lost because we give up loving too soon. Dartmouth graduate Fick writes that he was drawn to the infantry “where courage still counts. Being a Marine was not about money for graduate school or learning a skill; it was a rite of passage in a society becoming so soft and homogenized that the very concept was often sneered at.”

Love always perseveres in order to avoid the dishonor of letting someone else down who is depending on us, who believes in us, for whom we are the hands and heart of Christ. Love does not walk away from commitments when it would be easy and reasonable to do so. Love endures to the end. The world has a lot of starters but very few finishers. Love finishes the race. Love does not give up. Love does not quit. Love perseveres in the battle against evil because it wants to win the victory.

Stand up, stand up for Jesus, the trumpet call obey;

Forth to the mighty conflict in this his glorious day,

Ye that are men now serve him against unnumbered foes;

Let courage rise with danger, and strength to strength oppose.

Stand up, stand up for Jesus, the strife will not be long;

This day the noise of battle, the next the victor’s song;

To him who overcometh a crown of life shall be;

He with the King of glory shall reign eternally.

(George Duffield, Jr.)

GUIDE FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. How do J.B. Phillips’ and Leon Morris’s descriptions of love compare with popular conceptions such as ‘liquid love’ or love as a feeling?

2. How does love differ from grim duty?

3. “Perseverance has the backbone of courage.” Give an example from your own experience?

4. What is the connection between ‘love that endures to the end’ and salvation?

5. What does Jesus promise the overcomer?

6. How can you avoid sentimentality, on the one hand, and aggressiveness on the other?

7. Do you think that the core values of a Christian are Honor, Courage, and Commitment? Explain.

8. How do you fight the temptation to give up loving too soon.

9. How do you keep going, keep persevering, when the sensible thing seems to be to quit?

10. How has God demonstrated his love that perseveres?